Joe Harris is the Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, Massachusetts. He has been at Harvard University since 1988 and was previously on the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. Throughout his career, he has been deeply committed to education at every level, which led to a partnership with Benedict Gross to develop the Harvard course Fat Chance, the inspiration for the book of the same title. He is author of several books including 3264 and All That (Cambridge, 2016), Algebraic Geometry (1995), and The Geometry of Schemes (2000).

Emily Riehl is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland and previously was a Benjamin Peirce and NSF postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, Massachusetts. She has published over twenty papers and written two books: Categorical Homotopy Theory (Cambridge, 2014) and Category Theory in Context (2016). She has been awarded an NSF grant and a CAREER award to support her work and has been recognized for excellence in teaching at both Johns Hopkins and at Harvard.